Genre: Drama/Action/WW2
Premise: At the tail end of World War 2, a German war hero is tasked with exterminating 8000 American POWs… but instead helps them escape.
About: Today’s screenplay takes us back to the fruitful screenwriting decade that was the 1990s. Randall Wallace was one of the hottest screenwriters in the world. Just two years previous, in 1995, his movie, “Braveheart,” would capture audiences everywhere and go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Today’s 1997 Wallace script had Arnold Schwarzzeneger eagerly ready to commit. However, after Arnold changed his mind, the project never picked up enough steam again to make it to the finish line.
Writer: Randall Wallace
Details: 109 pages

Randall Wallace remains one of the most perplexing screenwriters ever.

He wrote one of the most celebrated, quoted, and memorable war films of all time in Braveheart. But he’s never written anything good since. After Braveheart, which came out in 1995, he got the opportunity of a lifetime in writing The Man In The Iron Mask. That movie, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, came out on the heels of the most successful film in history, Titanic. It was the biggest box office sure thing that you could’ve attached yourself too, and it was a gigantic bust.

Next up came Michael Bay’s attempt to be taken seriously with Pearl Harbor. That movie, starring an overly eager but still raw Ben Affleck, was also a disaster. Wallace got one more chance to bat, agreeing to write Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers.” But that movie was quickly forgotten almost as soon as it came out.

Wallace hasn’t written any movies since. And the reason I seem so flustered chronicling that reality is because I have this irrational fear that writers only get lucky once. They only have that one story that they perfectly connect with and are able to tell spectacularly, whereas everything else they write is average muck.

This isn’t true, of course. There are plenty of examples of writers who’ve written multiple great screenplays. But Wallace certainly isn’t helping me overcome my fear.

The year is 1944 and things are NOT looking good for the Germans. They’ve already started recruiting 16 year olds into their military ranks. Despite that, Hitler refuses to give up, and any German who even whispers that Germany could lose the war is executed on the spot.

One of the Germans’ last hopes is Nicholas Von Ostermann, a colonel of the Black Eagles, one of the most ruthless special units in the German army. Ostermann is notorious for going into battle against impossible odds and coming out alive.

Ostermann has a 12 year old son, a wife, and a polio-stricken brother, Reinhold, who’s a preacher. Reinhold is secretly working with a military unit to assassinate Hitler before all that’s left of Germany is ashes.

Despite Russia closing in on every front, Ostermann is determined to protect his country and heads north to stop the Russians from invading Berlin. He succeeds but in the process is shot and killed. Or so we think. Ostermann wakes up in some field being mass-buried with other deceased German soldiers. Ostermann kills the Russians, steals their truck, and drives home.

But he gets home to a Berlin that’s being bombed to smithereens. And his poor son is dead. Like REALLY dead. Although devastated, Ostermann is immediately ordered to travel to a POW camp that’s holding 8000 captured American bombers and then exterminate them. I didn’t know it was possible to capture that many bombers but okay.

Once there, Ostermann realizes he doesn’t want to kill anyone anymore. So he tells the prison brain trust that he’s going to separate the strong from the weak. He’ll tell the strong soldiers he’s rescuing them, but really, he’s leading them to an ambush where they’ll be wiped out. From there, they’ll slaughter all the weaker soldiers without any resistance.

But his real plan is to sneak a bunch of guns out with the Americans, and when they encounter the Germans, they’ll kill them all, and then make a run for the border, where American forces will be waiting. What makes things interesting is that the Americans don’t exactly trust this guy. So they have to decide if they should kill him the second they’re free. What will happen? I don’t know but I’m guessing a lot of chaos is going to be involved!

I’m trying to figure out how this script was put together. Because I get the sense it was majorly over-developed, with Wallace taking on and trying to incorporate a bunch of conflicting notes. This can happen during any development process. But it was especially prevalent in the 90s when there was a ton of money in development, and studios would put screenplays through the meat-grinder in search of creating that perfect link of screenplay sausage.

The script starts off with this German officer randomly running around Germany getting into conflicts. There’s no real direction to the story. It’s not bad. Wallace is a solid writer and every page reads well in a vacuum. But at one point, Ostermann dies, and then he comes back to life, and then he runs back to Germany, but literally the second he gets there, his town is bombed and his son is killed. It’s like we’re in a salt shaker and the writer can’t stop shaking it.

There are a lot of discussions with his brother, who’s an interesting character, but who, if we’re being honest, has no reason to be in the movie. This is where Hollywood seems clueless at times. You can get hung up on a cool character (he’s got polio! An actor will love to play him!). But everything interesting this character does, like put together a plan to kill Hitler, happens off-screen. He’s nowhere near the main plot.

The film eventually focuses in once Ostermann gets to the POW camp. Finally, we have ourselves a clear narrative. But why all the willy-nilly 40 pages of nonsense to get there? I get that if we see Ostermann’s son die, we’re going to feel more compassion for him than if his son’s death is backstory. But if you’re weighing 40 pages of setup to get that one death? I’m sorry but getting to the meat of the screenplay is way more important.

With that said, Ostermann is a strong character and I understand, from a studio’s point of view, why they made a few of these holding-up-the-narrative choices. At one point, Ostermann dies heroically in battle only to wake up as the Russians are mass-burying truckloads of dead Germans.

I can see an actor like Arnold Schwarzenegger flipping out for that scene. Which is one of the many paradigms of the business of screenwriting. Sometimes you have to detour your entire story to get a cool scene in because the star actor wants it in. As hard as that is for me to accept as a lover of writing, I do understand it from a business point-of-view.

And in Wallace’s defense, he creates two really fun characters here. Ostermann is this war hero who just won’t die. And then the other guy is Crane, the American bomber whose plane crashes and eventually is sent to the POW camp.

I always tell writers how important it is, especially in big movies like this, to give your main characters a whopper of a character introduction. And boy do we get one with Crane. He’s in the back of the bomber plane, watching as all of the bombs are being dropped when, all of a sudden, they get clogged together, in the drop-hole. And the bombs are active! So if they don’t do something fast, their plane will be blown to smithereens.

So Crane leaps on top of these active bombs and starts stomping on them to unclog them. It’s a great scene and immediately makes him a stand-out character.

On top of all this, the script nails one of the Screenwriting 101 tenets, which is to give us a new spin on something familiar. World War 2 scripts are a dime a dozen. But there aren’t many World War 2 movies where the main character is a Nazi. That’s a unique take and immediately makes the script stand out.

I would say that With Wings as Eagles could still be made today. But it needs to better establish what it is – which is basically a prison-break movie – and build its narrative around that from the get-go. Give us an opening scene showing Ostermann kick a$$ on the battlefield. Then have him receive the orders to go to the POW camp. Then cut to the POW camps so we can meet all the American prisoners. Establish all of them. Ostermann shows up. And we’re off to the races.

It’s endlessly annoying reading all these screenwriters overcomplicating their screenplays. It’s what kills 7 out of every 10 scripts I read. Get all the gunk out of the way and just give us a simple narrative with some really great characters and I guarantee we’ll be satisfied.

Despite all this, maybe because I’m feeling that July 4th holiday fireworks goodness exploding around me, I think this is a light “worth the read.” Check it out yourself with the script link NOW!

Script link: With Wings As Eagles

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The “Make Up For Lost Time” Character Intro — You already know that when you want to create a strong character, you have to give them a big memorable introduction. However, there’s an even more important time to do this. Let’s say that your story forces you to spend a ton of time setting up your main character, not unlike the way Ostermann is set up here. Then, you only have one scene to set up a major secondary character. In these times, it is ESSENTIAL that you give them a memorable introductory scene because they don’t have the benefit of the audience spending a lot of time with them like they have your main character. That’s why the Crane ‘bomb stomp’ introduction works so well in With Wings as Eagles. Notice they did this in Star Wars as well. They couldn’t introduce Han Solo early. So they needed to give him a big entrance in order to make up for lost time. They did this with him killing Greedo.

Hey, guys. I’m off for the holiday. But I wanted to give you a venue to talk about the latest Stranger Things episodes. I wish I had more to say about Stranger Things but I’ve always been only a casual fan. I keep trying to binge watch it and while I can always appreciate the show, I have a tough time getting into it for some reason. I still don’t really know why. I think I liked it when it was a simpler show. As its mythology has expanded, I’m just not as invested.

There is a show I HIGHLY highly highly highly recommend – and I’m probably going to do an article about it at some point – which is The Bear. It’s about a rising culinary star who’s forced to take over a beef sandwich joint back in his hometown of Chicago (Wuh-what!) when his father, the owner, dies. You know what it reminds me of? Uncut Gems. It’s got that same frenetic high-stakes move-move-move style. And, of course, I love any opportunity to promote something from my hometown, especially when it’s actually good.

The Bear is on Hulu. At least check out the pilot episode as it’s only 30 minutes. Then let me know what you think here!

Character flaws used to be a giant mystery to me. It was hard to identify them in movies unless they were overtly obvious. If I did identity them, I became obsessed with charting the flaw over the course of the movie and when the character actually overcame it. I wasn’t sure if the character was supposed to overcome the flaw all at once, in the end, or if they should overcome it bit by bit over the course of the story.

I got so frustrated by this process that I actually swore off character flaws. I convinced myself that they were antiquated Screenwriting 101 riff-raff. You didn’t need them. Any character “arc” that occurred in a movie was manipulated by the writer and therefore insincere.

I eventually rebounded back to somewhere in the middle. There are times when you give your characters flaws and times when you don’t. But I think most audiences want to see some sort of change in the main character over the course of the story or else they feel like there was no point to it all. If the main character didn’t learn anything, then why waste our time?

This goes back to the beginning of storytelling where each story needed to have a moral. And, usually, for a moral to occur, the main character would have to learn something. And in learning something, they’d change. Take one of the oldest tales in the book, The Scorpion and the Frog. The frog’s flaw might’ve been that he’s too trusting. The frog then takes the scorpion across the river but the scorpion stings him. The frog has learned a valuable lesson. Not to be so trusting. Unfortunately, he’s got poison in his body so now he’s going to die. But had he miraculously survived, he’d definitely be a little more suspicious of future animals needing his help. Hence, he’s changed.

Imagine that same story but, this time, the scorpion doesn’t sting the frog. They both get to the other side. The scorpion thanks the frog and says goodbye, and they both go on their way. If I’d told you that story, I assume you’d say to me, “What’s the point?” What do you mean, ‘what’s the point?’ They both made it across the river. “Yeah but nothing happened to them.” Right, cause they survived. “But nothing changed.”

That’s the key phrase there. “Nothing changed.” When people read stories, they expect there to be some change from where the story began or else they feel it was a waste of time. Now, while it’s true, you can rely solely on the PLOT for that change, if you’re doing it right, your plot and your main character are so intertwined that one can’t change without the other.

Now that we know why a character flaw is important, how do we create one? Well, I’m going to share a trick to help you find a flaw for your main character every single time. All you have to do is identify what their goal is in the movie and create a weakness within your character that makes it hard to achieve that goal.

For example, let’s say your main character is an up-and-coming golfer and his goal is to win the Masters. Ask yourself, what are some weaknesses that would make it hard for my character to win the Masters?

Well, they could be stubborn. Whenever a coach tries to teach them, our protagonist wants to do it “their way.” That’s their flaw. Another option: they allow their frustration to overcome them too easily, a la Happy Gilmore. Yet another option: they could be more obsessed with the glitz and glamour of being a professional athlete and therefore don’t put in the necessary work, a criticism that tennis star Nick Kyrgios has been labled with.

The good news is there isn’t some bag of 10,000 flaws you have to sift through every time you write a movie. I’d say there are about 15-20 character flaws that get explored in most movies. We’re all basically living the same experiences and, therefore, battling the same flaws.

Let’s look at another potential movie idea.

Two brothers, one who makes his living as a bank manager, the other who’s a long-time criminal. The criminal comes to the bank manager and says he wants to pull off a heist but can’t do it without the brother’s help.

So this one’s a little more complicated because it’s a two-hander and therefore we have to figure out flaws for each character. The way to do this is to identify the goal of each character. Remember, the goal will determine the flaw. The criminal has a simple goal – steal the money. Therefore, what weakness can we give him that’s going to make that as difficult as possible? It could be that he’s greedy. The heist has an “easy money” option and then some bonus money if they want to be more daring. Our criminal fighting that urge to get as much money as possible is how we explore his flaw.

Another flaw is he could be reckless. His style is to take risks. That helps him get more gold out of the pot than the average bank robber. But it also hurts him when the job is more complicated and needs a concise plan.

Now let’s look at the bank manager. At first glance, you might say his goal is the heist as well. But actually, his goal is to help his brother. At least in this movie it is. So if his goal is to help his brother, what weakness can we give him that makes that job as hard as possible?

The first one that come to mind is loyalty. The bank manager is so undyingly loyal to his brother that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to help him succeed. You can already see how this makes for an interesting arc. When things get heavy and the aftermath of the heist turns into chaos (innocent people are killed, the whole city is after them), how much needs to happen before the bank manager does the “right thing” over being loyal to his brother?

I used the template of “Ambulance” for that one so you can check that movie out to see those flaws in action.

Flaws always get a little tricky with two-handers. Because a lot of writers, for whatever reason – maybe it’s laziness – don’t want to do two character arcs. It’s easier to give the major flaw to one character and keep the other character flat. Another thing writers will do is they’ll give one of the characters a flaw that has to do with the goal. And the second character, the one who doesn’t have as big of a goal, they’ll give them a flaw that’s more internal.

They did this in The Lost City, that Sandra Bullock Channing Tatum movie that came out earlier in the summer. The movie follows romance author, Loretta, as she’s kidnapped to South America due to her knowledge of a rare treasure hidden in the South American jungle. Then you have Alan, the doofy model who plays the studly hero on all of Loretta’s book covers. He flies in to find Loretta to rescue her.

What’s interesting about this setup is that the goal isn’t that clear. Loretta has no interest in finding the treasure. She doesn’t even think it exists. She just wants to get out of the jungle and go home. The person who has the real goal here is Alan. He wants to rescue Loretta.

Now that we understand that, we can figure out his flaw. What can be a giant weakness that stands in the way of Alan achieving this goal? Well, what if Alan believes the hype? What if he believes he’s this great adventurer, even though he’s just the physical manifestation of a real hero? His flaw, then, is his inability to accept who he really is. His arc will entail coming to terms with the fact that he’s just a normal person, and only then will he be able to save Loretta.

Loretta’s flaw is trickier because Loretta’s goal is a negative one. She just wants to leave. She wants to go home. So that doesn’t give us a lot of room to create a compelling flaw. Therefore, the writers connected her flaw to her writing storyline instead. Loretta is a romance novelist who doesn’t have any romance in her life. Her flaw, then, is that she doesn’t believe in love anymore. Of course, over the course of the story, she will fall for Alan and believe in love again. Character arc achieved.

I know all of this is kind of confusing but if you remember this one thing, you’ll be able to come up with a strong flaw for your character every time: Figure out which character in the script has the biggest goal. And then give that character a weakness (aka ‘a flaw’) that makes achieving that goal as hard as possible. You have a little more leniency developing flaws for supporting characters if you even want to go there. But with the character who has the biggest goal in the story, that’s the formula you want to use.

So get to it!

Some quick clarification. I had to put up yesterday’s review late. So you can check that out here. I’m moving the Thursday article to Friday. You get to play with the newsletter in the meantime. We’ve got some things that have never happened before in a newsletter. I make a pitch for the next Star Wars show and it only involves Jawas. I recommend a cool new show that I suspect will be the successor to Ozark. I announce some really cool news about Scriptshadow alumnus, Nick Morris. And I take on a screenplay that has an even bigger concept than “Classified.” Can anyone say, “Inception Meets Saving Private Ryan?”

If you didn’t receive the newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send it to you!

Genre: Drama
Premise: Awkward and lonely, Jared is only able to find a community online — until the day he realizes that his favorite Youtuber lives nearby. Desperate for a connection, he becomes determined to find a way into her life… whether she wants it or not.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Alexandra Serio, has written and directed a couple of short films, one of which looks to be the inspiration for this screenplay.
Writer: Alexandra Serio
Details: 90 pages

One of the things I’ve been actively doing over the past month is weening myself off junk food internet content.

I’m doing this because, ironically, I watched a Youtube video about the effects of social media and what the video noted was that, a hundred years ago, you read the news in your small town and were immediately able to do something about it.

For example, if the local church burned down, you’d be able to get together with the community and help rebuild it. You’d have a physical outlet for the unresolved news issue.

But today, the news is always so far away – “Crazy Thing Happens in Washington!” – that you can’t actually do anything about it. So the energy that the news generates inside of you stays put, along with all the other junk you come across on the internet, creating a ton of anxiety that comes out in unproductive ways.

I bring this up because, as I’ve been detoxing, I’ve spotted more and more of these “black pill” videos. Since I don’t click on them, I don’t know much about the black pill philosophy. But from my understanding, it’s a negative defeatist way for men to look at the world.

Naturally, then, it’s a perfect backdrop for a screenplay! So let’s get into it!

Jared is in his 20s, lives in a trailer with his mom, and works at Wal-Mart. So, yeah, things aren’t going well for Jared. Jared deals with this through the “black pill” online community. Essentially, black pillers believe that certain men, aka “incels,” will always be invisible to women and therefore they should either accept this and not try to get with women or kill themselves.

But a tiny part of Jared is holding out hope. He watches this ASMR influencer online and she routinely puts out affirmation content where she whispers into your ears as you fall asleep that you are “worthy” and that “looks don’t matter.” Stuff like that.

Lo and behold, Jared can’t fathom his luck when he spots Dee AT HIS WAL-MART! As a Black Piller he can’t actually go up and talk to her so he follows her from a distance, even leaving work to follow her home. Once she’s home, he’s able to watch her livestream in person. As in stalking from his car across the street looking through her window “in person.”

When Jared sends her the livestream question, “Do you have a boyfriend?” And she ignores it, he goes ballistic. A primal incel force is triggered inside of him. He goes and buys a bunch of home improvement stuff and renovates an abandoned trailer near his home. He then sneaks into Dee’s home, waits for her, and kidnaps her (while wearing a mask) during her livestream!

He chains her up in his secondary trailer and starts reading all the news. Due to being kidnapped on a live stream, Dee becomes a national story. Jared spends the next couple of days not really sure what to do with Dee. He’s like the cat who finally catches the laser beam. Now what? He ultimately decides to execute a dramatic suicide on Dee’s channel. Will he be able to pull it off?

As you guys know, I love a good character description.

They’re an easy way for me to identify if I’m reading a good writer.

I really liked the description of Jared here. It’s a little long. But the main thing with any character description is that the reader HAS A GREAT FEEL FOR THE CHARACTER after they read it. So here’s Jared’s description in Blackpill.

JARED, a weary 20-something, enters and drops into a gaming chair exhausted. One look into his dark eyes reveals his exhaustion is soul deep; the look of a man who truly believes he’s never caught a break.

Let’s break this down piece by piece. First we get his age with the added bonus of an adjective. Right away, we’re learning things about this guy.

We’re then told he drops into a “gaming chair.” A “gaming chair” is a very specific piece of furniture. That’s what you want to do as a screenwriter. You want to focus on the SPECIFIC things your character has. Not the general things. If you would’ve told us that Jared, instead, dropped down onto “a couch,” that doesn’t give us nearly as much information about him.

The next sentence gave me even more insight into Jared: “One look into his dark eyes reveals his exhaustion is soul deep.” That’s a different situation than someone who’s simply “exhausted.” “Soul deep” means the exhaustion is irreversible.

Finally, we get this tag about how he “believes he’s never caught a break.” I love that description because we all know people like this, people who believe that life is against them and is determined to make their existence miserable, and how they use that as a sort of defense mechanism to explain not trying to improve. In 40 words, I have a great feel for this character.

Contrast this with yesterday’s character intros. Here’s one for the sister from that script, Brie:

SNIFF! BRIE MORGAN (38, pretty like a wilting flower) snorts a bump of blow like a pro.

The one good thing about this description is that we’re introducing the character during an ACTION, and actions are a great way to tell us about a character. The problem is that snorting coke is one of the most cliche actions in movies. Contrast this with the gaming chair. The gaming chair is SPECIFIC. Snorting coke is GENERIC.

We’re then told, rather clumsily in parenthesis, that Brie is “pretty like a wilting flower.” What does that mean? Is a wilting flower still pretty? So you’re saying she’s kind of pretty? Or are you saying a wilting flower isn’t pretty at all and therefore she’s ugly? Trying to be too clever by half when you’re not clever in the first place is a recipe for writing disaster. Clarity over cuteness, always.

Or here’s one from a script I’m going to review in the newsletter:

Subtle pockmarked scars surround sage eyes — eyes carrying oceans of weight. In another life he may have been a poet.

Holy Moses is this weak. Eyes carrying “oceans of weight.” Extremely clunky phrasing that doesn’t quite make sense. Avoid at all costs. “In another life he may have been a poet.” That’s a strange thing to say after the “oceans of weight” debacle. Where is the connection? Just because you have a lot of history in your eyes, you’re a poet all of a sudden? Weird description all around.

Just remember that when it comes to descriptions, the harder you try, the worse you do. Key in on your hero’s defining characteristic (like Jared, he’s almost given up on life) and give us a simple description that conveys that.

As for the rest of Blackpill, it was pretty good. I enjoy the sub-genre of characters in mental decline. There’s a built-in trainwreck aspect to the narrative and as much as we hate ourselves for it, we all look forward to seeing the crash when we pass it. One of the best versions of this sub-genre is Magazine Dreams. Very similar to this script.

Where I had some issues with Blackpill was with the plot. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in it. Man feels unseen. Man sees influencer he’s obsessed with. Man prepares to kidnap influencer. Man does kidnap influencer. Man executes plan to kill himself.

My issue here is that I couldn’t figure out which route the writer wanted to go down. If this was a stalker thriller in the vein of Single White Female, it needs more twists and turns. If it’s a character study like Joker, you need to dig into the character more. Or, in this case, into both characters. While I had a good feel for Jared, I didn’t know Dee that well. And in a narrative this simple, you probably need to expand the character work to include the co-star.

Cause I think that’s what would’ve elevated this. Let’s look at the circumstances by which a guy could be pulled into this dangerous online religion. But let’s also see how girls can be pulled into, arguably, the just as dangerous religion of influencing. I felt like Serio was starting to go there towards the end. But it was too little too late. I believe this becomes a much more intellectual experience if we’re showing Dee’s influencer obsession as well.

With that said, it’s an easy read and I wanted to find out how things were going to end. As long as you accomplish that, you’ve written a good script.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: This script is a great example of how point-of-view changes a story. If you write this from Dee’s point of view, it’s a survival story. If you write this from Jared’s point-of-view, it’s an obsessive stalker story. But there’s a third option. You can write it from both points-of-view. And then it becomes more of an intellectual experience, something that gets cinephiles and critics talking. So always explore every potential point-of-view before you write your script. You might be overlooking the best version of your screenplay.